The Gay Science

On Monday, the Supreme Court announced it would not hear arguments over a Florida law that bans adoption by gay men, lesbians, and same-sex couples. In an earlier decision last January, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that recent developments did not change “the accumulated wisdom of several millennia of human experience” that the ideal environment in which to raise a child is a monogamous, heterosexual marriage. In a “Sandbox” last March, Ann Hulbert looked at a series of controversial, unsatisfying studies purporting to demonstrate the effects of same-sex parenting and suggested that even gay-rights advocates were too focused on proving the sameness, rather than the success, of gay parenting.